This piece depicts the Alameda Theater in San Antonio, Texas. When it opened in 1949, it was the largest movie theater dedicated to Spanish language cinema in the USA.

Rather than suspending a single moment, my photography examines the passage of time. To accomplish this, I invented a modern digital version of the panoramic camera. In my version, a single sliver of space is imaged over an extended period of time, yielding the surprising result that unmoving objects are blurred and moving bodies are rendered clearly. This is no trick. This is photography in the purist sense, but a form of photography where abstraction is the norm, not the exception.

Over the past 20 years, Ansen Seale has developed his own photographic technique called “slit scan photography.” He invented his own camera–a modern and digital cousin of the panoramic camera–that has the faculties to invert many of the traditional rules of photography. With his equipment, unmoving objects are blurred and moving objects are rendered clearly. “It is important to understand that my images are not artificially manipulated. This is truly the way the slit scan camera sees the world,” he says. Though a photographer by practice, Ansen is most influenced by painters, and the images he produces possess a notably painterly quality.